Known as "meteorite hunters", they wander the sparsely populated Gobi Desert in search of meteorites from space. Some people get rich overnight because they harvest a meteorite; some people spend all their savings because of the meteorite and get nothing, or even their wives and children are separated.
Chen Qiang is a veteran player in the meteorite circle, in his words: "Meteorites are not ordinary family games at the beginning, and most of the people who really think about finding meteorites and collecting meteorites are people who have made certain achievements in other industries and then turned to the meteorite circle." Unless you're lucky, meteorites alone would have already drunk the northwest wind. ”
Chen Qiang's description is basically consistent with the development of meteorites in China. As early as the 19th century, meteorite hunters have developed into a profession, meteorite hunters either search for meteorites at their own expense and then sell them to their next home, or accept the commission of their employers to perform a "carpet search" of an area.
By the 1970s, there were more than 100 full-time meteorite hunters in the United States who made a living from "meteorites", and tens of thousands of meteorite enthusiasts worked part-time and occasionally played a ticket. In the late 1990s, meteorites began to appear as a commodity at trade fairs and online in the United States, causing onlookers each time.
In the 1980s, china's folk meteorite collection had just started. At that time, the domestic economic level was low, the people's income was limited, everyone thought about making money, spending money to play meteorites was often regarded as a matter of not doing the right thing, so the people who could play meteorites were a minority, and they were not bad money masters.
Because of this, the meteorites of that year were all "cabbage prices"! Zhang Yulin, who has worked at the Beijing Planetarium for nearly 50 years, once revealed to the media that in his early years, when he searched for meteorites, he sometimes only needed a box of paper cigarettes or pots and pans for daily life to get a meteorite back from the hands of local villagers, and now it seems that there is no shortage of valuable and scarce varieties.
After 1995, the "meteorite boom" in the United States and Europe began to blow into the country, and the price of meteorites soared, whether it was a full-time "meteorite hunter" or a part-time meteorite enthusiast were talking about the "legend of sudden wealth" about meteorites, of which the most influential one occurred in 2000.
That year, a resident of Fukang, Xinjiang, stumbled upon a strange-looking, faintly gleaming olivine meteorite weighing more than 1,000 kilograms on the nearby Gobi Desert. A few years later, this giant meteorite suddenly appeared in the United States, the price reached a staggering $300 / g, since then the meteorite has continued to appear at the World Meteorite Exhibition, Mineral Exhibition, and has become a well-deserved "treasure of the town exhibition"!
The real "meteorite fever" erupts because of the boost of two things. On February 15, 2013, a meteorite crash occurred in The Chelyabinsk region of Russia, and then locals took the meteorite they picked up to sell online, and a meteorite the size of a ping-pong ball was sold for as little as a few thousand dollars and as much as tens of thousands of dollars. In that year, meteorites were introduced at domestic mining exhibitions and placed in a prominent position as a special mineral species. At the 2014 Beijing International Mining Exhibition, there were 8 meteorite booths alone, and the visitors were surrounded by water.
The other is the Meteor Fall incident in Xishuangbanna in 2018. After the meteorite fell, meteorite hunters and enthusiasts from all over the country flocked to form an army of thousands of people looking for meteorites with local villagers. A villager in Manlang's group picked up a 1.6-kilogram meteorite and was immediately bought for 160,000 yuan, about 145 yuan a gram. Not only meteorites, but also craters! Meteorite hunter Zhang Bo purchased the 13 cm long and 25 cm deep crater and surrounding mud for 10,000 yuan and donated it to the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum free of charge.
The Xishuangbanna meteorite incident brought the enthusiasm of ordinary people to a new height, so after the meteor shower crash in Henan on November 29, 2021, thousands of meteorite enthusiasts rushed to Henan that day. Locals are also eager to try it out, and it has become a hot news spot for a while.
Meteorite hunters are happy for the hot meteorite market, while lamenting the difficulty of meteorite searching. Looking for meteorites is mostly on the edge of the desert and on the Gobi Desert, not that meteorites like to land here, but are easy to be found. A significant portion of the world's meteorites are found in the Sahara Desert because it is large enough. Xinjiang is the favorite place for meteorite hunters in China, especially the Altay region at the junction of Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia and China, but it snows here for 10 months a year, and the real search operation is only in July and August.
Meteorite hunter Zhang Bo ventured into the Altay region in November of a certain year in order to complete a meteorite-related mission. Before reaching the predetermined position, Zhang Bo encountered a blizzard and lived in a wooden house of a Kazakh fellow. When he was preparing to leave the next morning, Zhang Bo suddenly found that the door of the house was blocked by snow!
Finally, the windows were smashed with a shovel, and a hole was dug out of the snow before climbing out. Zhang Bo later mentioned this matter and still had palpitations, when the heavy snow had buried the house, and the house was crushed by the heavy snow later!
Coincidentally. Meteorite hunter Cui Peng and several friends once ran to the Gobi Desert in the Kumtaze Desert in Hami, Xinjiang, in search of meteorites. The next day, they encountered a level 8 wind, the wind blew darkly, the sand fell everywhere, and the group stayed up all night. At night, the temperature suddenly dropped to freezing, and the next day the road was covered with heavy snow and white. Worse, the low temperature caused the navigation system to fail, and Cui Peng almost got lost and took a long time to return safely!
It is not easy to find meteorites as a reason for the soaring price, but because the high price also leads to a large number of fake meteorites mixed in the market, some people use this to obtain high profits.
There are more than 20,000 posts on a meteorite website seeking to identify meteorites, and only 57 of them were identified as real meteorites, a group that does not make a profit from counterfeiting, and most of them are amateurs. Some clever counterfeiters produced meteorites have been frequently put on display in the science and technology museum, a provincial science and technology museum once exhibited 27 meteorites, according to industry insiders, only one "Banma meteorite" is a real meteorite, it fell in 2016 in Banma County, Qinghai Province, the others are fake meteorites, although they are marked with fall events, locations.
Meteorite fraud has formed a complete set of meteorite chains, one of the important reasons is that meteorites are diverse in shape and difficult for ordinary people to distinguish, which facilitates the creation of a new meteorite variety. They fabricate scientific articles and distort meteorite identification theories, including fabricating various serendipitous encounters that ordinary people like to accept. Some counterfeiters pretended to be doctors, falsely claiming that many years ago, when the elders of the family were working in Xinjiang, they picked up a strange stone that could treat various difficult and complicated diseases, and then "fled" after waiting for people to buy it.
Meteorite prices are also related to how they are found. If a meteorite is found after the meteorite falls, in full view of the public, the price is several times that of ordinary meteorites. Therefore, some people have a crooked mind, they first bury the old meteorite in the meteorite landing area in advance, and wait for the people to "find" it when they look for the meteorite. Because this meteorite is generally "genuine", and there are many secrets to be mined, sometimes the price that can be shouted out far exceeds the actual value.
It should be pointed out that there are differences in the international ownership of meteorites, in the United States, Germany, France meteorites belong to the owners of the landing sites; while in Argentina, Algeria meteorites belong to the state. China has had two large public discussions on the ownership of meteorites, but no consensus has been reached, so it is still in a gray area.
Original: Old High